Mobile Magazines

Mobile magazines will be magazines on a mobile computing and communication platform (in contrast to print magazines about mobile technologies), providing valuable, current multi-media content. However, there is a gap in the value chain between mobile operators and content publishers, hindering established small and medium sized publishers to enter the mobile market despite its commercial potential. A mobile operator publishing and entertainment platform enables the creation of a new category of mobile service called a mobile magazine. An m-Mag (mobile magazine) eco-system is a next generation mobile publishing service that is made available from a mobile operator’s portal, that is integrated with value added mobile data services and that uses the operator’s billing capabilities to charge consumers for access to the magazine. Using Parlay/OSA as an open approach, the m-Mag platform can integrate into an operator’s network using standardised APIs and is portable across different operator networks. A discussion of the commercial potential analyses the route to the market.

Middleware Support for Context-Aware Ubiquitous Multimedia Services

In order to facilitate the development and proliferation of multimedia services in ubiquitous environment, a context-aware multimedia middleware is indispensable. This chapter discusses the middleware support issues for context-aware multimedia services. The enabling technologies for the middleware such as representation model, context management, and multimedia processing are described in detail. On top of our previous work, the design and implementation of a context-aware multimedia middleware, called CMM, is presented. The infrastructure integrates both functions of context middleware and multimedia middleware. This chapter also aims to give an overview of underlying technologies so that researchers in ubiquitous multimedia domain can understand the key design issues of such a middleware.

Mobile Fractal Generation

Ever since the discovery of the Mandelbrot set, the use of computers to visualise fractal images have been an essential component. We are looking at the dawn of a new age, the age of ubiquitous computing. With many countries having near 100% mobile phone usage, there is clearly a potentially huge computation resource becoming available. In the past years there have been a few applications developed to generate fractal images on mobile phones. This chapter discusses three possible methodologies whereby such images can be visualised on mobile devices. These methods include: the generation of an image on a phone, the use of a server to generate the image and finally the use of a network of phones to distribute the processing task.

Content-Based Video Streaming Approaches and Challenges

Video streaming poses significant technical challenges in quality of service guarantee and efficient resource management. Generally, it is recognized that end-to-end quality requirements of video streaming application can be reasonably achieved only by integrative study of advanced networking and content processing techniques. However, most existing integration techniques stop at the bit stream level, ignoring a deeper understanding of the media content. Yet, the underlying visual content of the video stream contains a vast amount of information that can be used to predict the bit-rate or quality more accurately. In the content-aware video streaming framework, video content is extracted automatically and used to control video quality under various manipulations and network resource requirements.

Ensuring Task Conformance and Adaptability of Polymorph Multimedia Systems

This chapter shows how specifications of mobile multimedia applications can be checked against usability principles very early in software development through an analytic approach. A model-based representation scheme keeps transparent both, the multiple components of design knowledge as well as their conceptual integration for implementation. The characteristics of mobile multimedia interaction are captured through accommodating multiple styles and devices at a generic layer of abstraction in an interaction model. This model is related to context representations in terms of work tasks, user roles and preferences, and problem-domain data at an implementation-independent layer. Tuning the notations of the context representation and the interaction model enables, prior to implementation, to check any design against fundamental usability-engineering principles, such as task conformance and adaptability. In this way, also alternative design proposals can be compared conceptually. Consequently, not only the usability of products becomes measurable at design time, but also less effort has to be spent on user-based ex-post evaluation requiring re-design.

Software Engineering for Mobile Multimedia

Research on mobile multimedia mainly focuses on improving wireless protocols in order to improve the quality of services. In this chapter, we argue that another perspective should be investigated in more depth in order to boost the mobile multimedia industry. This perspective is software engineering which we believe it will speed up the development of mobile multimedia applications by enforcing reusability, maintenance, and testability. Without any pretense of being comprehensive in its coverage, this chapter identifies important software engineering implications of this technological wave and puts forth the main challenges and opportunities for the software engineering community.

A Fast Handover Method for Real-Time Multimedia Services

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) has been standardized for mobility management in the IPv6 network. When a mobile node changes its point of attachment in the IPv6 network, it experiences a time due MIPv6 procedures when it cannot receive or send any packets. This time called the handover delay might also cause packet loss resulting undesired quality-of-service degradation for various types of applications. The minimization of this delay is especially important for real-time applications. In this chapter we present a fast handover method called the flow-based fast handover for Mobile IPv6 (FFHMIPv6) to speed up the MIPv6 handover processes. FFHMIPv6 employs flow information and IPv6-in-IPv6 tunneling for the fast redirection of the flows during the MIPv6 handover. Also, FFHMIPv6 employs a temporary hand-off-address to minimize the upstream connectivity. We present the performance results comparing the FFHMIPv6 method to other fundamental handover methods with Network Simulator 2 (ns-2) and Mobile IPv6 for Linux (MIPL) network.

Key Attributes and the Use of Advanced Mobile Services

Advanced mobile service use and adoption remains low in most of the Western world despite impressive technological developments. Much effort has thus been placed on better understanding the behavior of advanced mobile service users. Previous research efforts have identified several key attributes deemed to provide indications of the behavior of consumers in the m-services market. This chapter continues with this line of research by further exploring these key attributes of new mobile services. Through a field study of new mobile service use by 36 Danish mobile phone users, this chapter illustrates the manner in which users’ perceptions related to the key attributes of service quality, content-device fit and personalization were adversely affected after approximately three months of trial of the services offered.

Spatial Data on the Move

The pervasiveness of mobile computing devices and wide-availability of wireless networking infrastructure have empowered users with applications that provides location-based services as well as the ability to pose queries to remote servers. This necessitates the need for adaptive, robust, and efficient techniques for processing the queries. In this chapter, we identify the issues and challenges of processing spatial data on the move. Next, we present insights on state-of-art spatial query processing techniques used in these dynamic, mobile environments. We conclude with several potential open research problems in this exciting area.

Mobile Multimedia Collaborative Services

Mobile communication and Web technologies have paved the way for mobile multimedia collaborative services that allows people, team and organisation to collaborate in dynamic, flexible and efficient manner. Indeed, it should be possible to establish and terminate collaborative services with any partner anytime at anywhere on any network and any device. While severe requirements are imposed on collaborative services, their development and deployment should be simple and less time-consuming. The design, implementation, deployment and operation of collaborative services meet challenging issues that need to be resolved. The chapter starts with a study of collaboration and the different collaboration forms. An overview of existing collaborative services will be given. A generic model of mobile collaborative services is explained together with the basic collaborative services. A service oriented architecture platform supporting mobile multimedia collaborative services is described. To illustrate the development of mobile multimedia collaborative service, an example is given.